Does Performance Affect Attendance at NFL Home Games?

I built an NFL attendance vs performance dashboard to practice real data prep in Excel and analysis in Tableau, doing the kind of work I would want to do for an NFL team. The dataset covers 2021 through 2025 and I focused primarily on home game attendance, win percentage, and stadium capacity. I collected datasets from the ESPN and NFL websites and converted all of those various datasets into a long dataset in Excel. I did quality assurance and cleaning, then in Tableau I joined the attendance table to the capacity table. I went on to create calculated fields that allowed me to display my time-series data in dashboards and visualizations effectively, and put it all together in a story with some of my observations. The Tableau story includes division views and an all-teams overview with filters and annotations so people can explore season over season.

Key takeaways from the analysis:
Even though a game may be announced as a sellout, that does not guarantee a completely full building. With Covid restrictions lifted in 2021 there was still visible caution in some cities and states that season, and most teams saw a lift in attendance from 2021 to 2022. Performance is a strong indicator of attendance in some places, especially in the AFC South during this window, but many other factors also matter, including weather, lingering post-pandemic concerns, and whether tickets can be resold easily. Some markets are more elastic than others, which shows up as bigger swings in percent filled when results or conditions change. I noticed that for the current 2025 season, some of the teams that really underperformed (Browns, Jets, Titans) saw a solid decrease in attendance this year.

In the future, I want to extend the view back before the pandemic to benchmark each club’s pre-2020 baseline and study how quickly different markets reverted to that baseline. I would also try to bring in game-day weather, secondary market data, and ticket prices to measure elasticity by market more directly. For this version I focused on 2021 to 2025 because the teams have not changed cities or stadiums in that span, which made it possible to build a clean datasets in a few hours. The interactive Tableau story at the bottom lets you dig into the divisions, compare teams, and see how stadium fill and winning moved together across the last four seasons. (activate full-screen mode at the bottom right)